In a contradictory fashion, researchers, their departments and universities simultaneously recognize the unpredictability of fieldwork experiences and outcomes and help establish a bureaucratic system of planning every component of their research. Ethnographic unpredictability and its consequences are a fact of fieldwork and it is essential that researchers and institutions are prepared to view these as part of interpretable data, to learn from them and not mask them. This article examines ethnographic unpredictability through the lens of sexual violence which I experienced during my doctoral fieldwork in Sierra Leone. I show how I redirected my research and renegotiated my position as an academic. I discuss the culture of risk and analyse the influence of neoliberalism on the university. I describe how ‘market logic’ conceptualizes unpredictability as competitive disadvantage. I show the impact that the imaginary ‘perfect academic’ has on early career researchers and the complicity of mainstream academic (re-)presentation in nourishing the image of the ‘in-control academic’ through muting personal field experiences and vulnerabilities and silencing unpredictable occurrences in academic writing. I conclude with recommendations on how personal situatedness, vulnerabilities, and transformations can be approached as factors in every research endeavour which must not pose threats to an institution’s competitive advantage.
In a steadily expanding carceral landscape, rough sleepers are using prisons in unforeseen ways: namely to escape violence, for survival, to access social or medical care, enhance their prospects or regain housing. Like most neoliberal welfare states, the German aid system is dispersed and based on individual responsibility, but in prison it concentrates due to the prison’s duty to rehabilitate which translates into care for the subject position ‘inmate’ but holds politically unwanted unhoused persons responsible to change their fates. Poor and disenfranchised people who use prisons as lifelines turn the carceral grip into an embrace. Their tactics reveal a reverse cycle of carcerality where the streets are the space of detriment and the prison, trough harnessing the productivity of penal power, offers a break or potential escape from carceral livelihoods. Rough sleepers who seek imprisonment to escape the hardship and confinement of the streets challenge the concept of less eligibility and offer new ways to theorise the carceral and to think through prisons and the iron rules of punishment.
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